Niall Williams - History of the Rain

Well, anyway, here you are, that’s the setting. That’s the way Balzac does it in Eugénie Grandet (Book 2,017, Penguin Classics, London).

Lands, a house, some money, Mrs Cissley said. She wore the cheapest perfume but compensated by wearing an enormous quantity.

Which, Dear Reader, is stifling.

There follows a small gap in our narrative.

Do a little work here yourself, I’m on medication. Pick up from that scene in Wheaton, ash on his trousers, grey light, cramped little setting for a resurrection. You go ahead.

Doctor Mahon is here to see me.

As they say on RTE, there may be interruptions to service due to Ongoing Works.

Abraham arrived in Ireland.

I think maybe it was because there were no Swains here. This was a tabula rasa. I think he came to Meath and took over the farm because he decided it was a calling of some kind and he had come around to believing in Out of the Blue. Impulsiveness and Swains are close cousins, not removed. We head off in a burst in some direction thinking this is it only to find ourselves nowhere.

Vision and blindness, that’s us in the Short Version.

Contrariness too. Grandfather came to Ireland just as anyone remotely Anglo went in the opposite direction.

That just raised the Standard. Grandfather decided that in Meath he would out-Wiltshire Wiltshire. He would make a better place to show his father and then one day invite the old Reverend over and say Behold . It’s a Paradise Complex. (I was going to do Psychology in college but then I read that Freud said Psychology was no use for Irish people, we’re either Too Deep or Not Deep at all.)

The Paradise Complex means you keep trying to make heaven on earth. You’re never satisfied. And that’s the crux, as the Philosopher Donie Downes says. See also: The Jerusalem Syndrome.

Grandfather couldn’t take the easy option. He couldn’t close his eyes and come up with one of those imaginary paradises of which there are so many accounts in my father’s library. Here’s Lucian in his True History of the Isles of the Blessed (Book 1,989, Utopias of the Mind , Crick & Howard, Bristol) who said he’d seen a town made of gold and streets paved with ivory and the whole encircled with ‘a river of superior perfume’. It never got dark there, and it never got light, but was in perpetual twilight and permanent springtime. Vines in paradise fruited once a month according to Lucian. There were 365 waterwells, 365 honeysprings, 7 rivers of milk, 8 rivers of wine (sorry, Charlie, no chocolate factory) and the people wore clothes of cobwebs because their bodies were so insubstantial . Look in Virgil’s Aeneid , Book VI (Book 1,000, trans. J. W. Mackail, Macmillan, London) where he talks about the Elysian Fields. What about heading there, Granda?

There are any number of imaginary gardens, most of which though were pooh-poohed by Sir Walter Raleigh, who after all that voyaging probably had what Mina Prendergast channelling Shakespeare called an unbuttoned scent, but whose ego was capacious enough to write The History of the World . Sir Walter pointed out that Homer’s description of the garden came from Moses’s description, and that in fact Pindar, Hesiod, Ovid, Pythagoras, Plato and all those chaps were actually a bunch of plagiarists who added to Old Moses their own Poetic Adornments. The real heavenly garden was copyrighted to Moses, and that was that. The rest was poppycock, Your Majesty.

Thank you, Walter, have a cigarette.

No. Grandfather wasn’t taking any route into the Imaginary. It was too easy. This was going to have to be actual grass-and-stones Paradise.

So Abraham laid Meath up against the Impossible Standard and began moulding the place into the dream version. He was going to do the So-Like-Paradise-You-Won’t-Believe-it’s-Not-Paradise kind of thing. Maybe there was already Something There to Work With, as that witch with the yellow highlights Miss Donnelly said to my mother at a parent — teacher meeting. Even so it can’t have been easy.

First of all he was, you know, an Englishman.

And as I said there weren’t exactly a whole load of those coming one-way to Ireland those days. The first Tourist Board was still meeting in some little room in Merrion Square and working on the posters and slogans. Civil War Over, Come Visit. We won’t kill you. Promise . Second, he was, sshssh , Not Belonging to Our Church (O Divine Lord) and third, after his Oxford education he didn’t know one side of a cow from the other. (Reader, there are sides. When I was five Nan showed me. She carried a three-legged stool and plonked it down next to Rosie, head-butting in against Rosie’s side and reaching in for the udder. You go from the opposite side and Rosie will break your wrist. Such a cow.)

The thing is, the Philosophy has a No Complaint clause. You can’t cry out and you can’t say this was a dreadful mistake .

You have to just do better.

And so that’s what he did.

It took years, but eventually Grandfather got Ashcroft House & Lands into a condition of Absolute Immaculacy, and sent his invitation to the Reverend.

I am alive. Come on over and visit , only in fancier English.

Then he waited.

The Reverend was already Old Testament ancient by now. In my mind he blends into Herbert Pocket’s father in Great Expectations , Old Gruffandgrim, banging with his stick on the floor for attention. The Reverend had already used up whatever life was in his body by putting up the big mileage of hurrying Elsewhere and so by this stage he was mostly parched paper over thin little struts. He couldn’t believe Our Lord hadn’t taken him Up yet. Honest to God. He was all prayed up and confessed, boarding pass printed, and waiting in the priority queue. Sweet Jesus come on , as Marty Finucane shouts in Cusack Park whenever the hurlers are feeling the effects of forbidden Saturday-night Guinness and firing the sliothers wide into the Tesco carpark.

But no Sweet Jesus showed up.

(If you went to the Tech, you’ll spot a theme.)

The Reverend lived on, thought a little more deeply about life being purgatory, and banged on the floor with his stick.

When at last he got the letter he lifted old Up-Jut and did some nostril-narrowing. It wasn’t attractive. He squinted through the snowy dust of his spectacles to read his son’s name and when he saw your son Abraham he had to squint harder.

There it was: your son Abraham.

He thought all this time his son was in Heaven interceding for him.

He thought Abraham had gone there in the first rank of Dead Heroes from The Great War and by now probably had the skintone of those creamy alabaster plaques they have in the big Protestant churches.

But no, he was in Ireland .

Sweet Jesus come on .

Now, I’m not going to say it was because the Reverend thought mucky Irish ground would give him foot rot, nor that it was because he couldn’t say the word Ireland without distaste, though both were probably true. Despite the efforts of the Tourist Board, Ireland in those days was not in Top Ten Countries to Visit, and for English people it was all but verboten as the Pope would say. Ireland? Catholics and murderers, the Reverend would have thought. Ungrateful blackguards, we had not the slightest appreciation for the eight hundred years of civilised rule of His Majesty and to show our true colours once the English had departed we’d set about killing each other with hatchets, slash hooks and hedge shears.

Ireland? Better that Abraham was in Hell.

Pursuing the image, the Reverend posted the letter through the grille of the fire and began some shallow breathing. The damp boggy idea, Ireland , sat on his chest.